He had an immersion chair alright — what cyberspace cowboy worth their salt didn't?— but he didn't like it, nor did he trust the fucking thing as far as he could throw it. The height of comfort for cyberspace deep-diving, meant to gradually break you in from the scorching, unbearable heat of jacking in long-term to temperatures so frigid it'd crystallize a bead of sweat at the base of your spine. In other words, the fancy gear was corpo-kiddie Netwatch Academy shit, but a real junkie knew better: nothing topped the ice bath. The plummet back to earth wasn't supposed to be gradual, comfortable, easy; it was supposed to shock your system so hard it made your nuts jump into your brain stem, a hard reminder of where the fuck you were when your consciousness came colliding back into your meat. Naked, shivering, guts twisted, jaw clenched so tight it made your teeth nearly crack, so close to dying you'd never felt more alive.
There was no high worth soaring toward without the brutal crash that followed and the Net was no different; made the ecstasy of escape, of disappearing into the void again, a much sweeter relief.
ROURKE: I’ll keep this brief since apparently the lady’s got a full social calendar; there’s a thirty-grand payout on the table if you’re up for it. Yes or no?
ELLSY: Intriguing. Don’t you usually save your real high-eddie contracts for the boys in-house?
ROURKE: Anyone with a logo and an entry in our database can’t be seen anywhere near this. The job requires discretion and iron-clad deniability on our end, otherwise we risk starting another war before we’re ready to start one. Now are you the man for the job or not, Horvath?
ELLSY: For thirty stacks? The fuck do you think… What am I after?
ROURKE: Arasaka’s got an envoy in town, some middle-management dickhead by the name of Hayashi; I’m transferring the dossier. Communications confirm the guy’s being sent in as a financial liaison on Arasaka’s behalf for the purpose of further incentivizing their little pain-in-the-ass pet thugs.The Tyger Claws are pretty much Yorinobu’s only stronghold of influence left that could give the company a leg-up back into the city — Long story short, MiliTech wants that partnership terminated. Penalties from the Top Brass back in Tokyo are sure to be swift and merciless if the Claws can’t manage to protect the neck of the walking ATM they were gifted for even one lousy night, you following?
ELLSY: Uh huh. Where and when?
ROURKE: Tonight — intel says Hayashi’s holed up at the Juicy Jiggles in Kabuki for an evening of entertainment. Flatline him on his way back to his hotel, make it look like he got boosted by a threat the Claws should have been able to handle, and you’ll get your deposit.
ROURKE: One more thing — take his driver out too while you’re at it. I like a clean break with all my loose ends tied up.
Broderick Rourke. 71. Senior Director of Militech's PMC & Security Division. Just like every other corporate goon, Rourke prefers the position of the unseen hand, spending his officially-off-the-clock nights operating as the behind-the-frontlines puppetmaster, moving mercenaries and netrunners across Night City's underbelly like chess pieces. His end game? The ultimate benefit of Militech and the NUSA, naturally. Rourke pays handsomely and he always pays on time— all he asks is very little in return: do what you're told, don't ask questions, and know your place, soldier. Never forget which one of you is expendable.
That gutter-dwelling dirtbag piece of shit had been dead for nearly four years now but somehow, every fucking bit of this still seemed like his goddamn fault. The metaphorical butterfly flapping its wings a little too carelessly, thrusting the future of everybody else in its orbit toward an unstoppable cataclysmic downward spiral with no thought whatsoever about the damage left in its wake. Even after all this time, the faintest recollection of his name in the back of Katz’s subconscious tasted like bile in the depths of his throat and smarted so badly that if the walking pile of worthless garbage hadn’t long been pureed into meat-and-metal-medley soup, the newly-minted merc would have made it his life’s mission to find him again and kill him himself.
Alas, there was no real cathartic closure to be had in this hellhole and that was just the way of it.
Besides, taking the little prick out back somewhere and putting him down with a slug to the brain like a rabid stray might have been a delightful fantasy and all, but in reality if he had actually gotten the chance… Well of course he absolutely would have still done it. He would have enjoyed it too. But it wouldn’t have made them square. Not even close. Not after Katz’s very existence had turned into some sort of cosmic fucking joke; the disintegration of his family, his entire future before his very eyes – and for what? An ass-kicking once or twice when they were stupid teenagers? A little bullying? He deserved this kind of irreversible lifelong ruination just because he was 17 and an asshole to some slum rat from Santo no one else at the academy liked either?
What a little pussy you were. Even chromed-out to the max, you couldn’t even make it to 20. Tch. This city was always going to spit you out and pick its teeth with your bones no matter how hot shit you thought that Sandy made you… Fuck, I hope you’re barking in hell right now.
He thought better of it and took that back immediately. An eternity in hell would imply the infinite continuation of the fucker somewhere, even if confined to another, more miserable plane of existence far removed from this one – no. No, he hoped that, regardless of doctrine, every bit of that reincarnation or afterlife shit was a hoax and the son of a bitch stopped being anyone anywhere ever again once his brains lay splattered in chunks across the smooth-paved asphalt of Corpo Plaza at the barrel of Adam Smasher’s gun. That would make the two of them even, the complete erasure of David Martinez and his stupid ‘legend’ from the entirety of the universe – the same way everything Katsuo Tanaka had once been and everything he ever thought he was going to be was as good as damnatio memoriae now.
DECEMBER DEATH MATCH STREET RACE. WRAITH’S RULES IN PLAY. 10K ULTIMATE JACKPOT. DECEMBER 29, 2079, 3:30 PM PACIFIC TIME. OUTSIDE DENNYSON’S GARAGE; THE NORTHSIDE INDUSTRIAL DISTRICT, WATSON. NIGHT CITY.
RULE #1: DEADLY FORCE IS FAIR GAME. ONLY THE TOP THREE DRIVERS MAXIMUM WILL MAKE IT OUT ALIVE.
RULE #2: DRIVERS MUST PASS THROUGH ALL CHECKPOINTS IN ORDER TO WIN. THE AGREED-UPON TRACK IS THE LOOP BETWEEN DENNYSON’S AND THE FARTHEST END OF THE OLD ARASAKA WATERFRONT WITH SIX CHECKPOINTS IN BETWEEN.
RULE #3: EACH CONTESTANT MUST HAVE A DESIGNATED REPRESENTATIVE TO CLAIM THEIR REMAINS AT THE END OF THE RACE.
RULE #4: FOR EVERYONE ELSE, THERE ARE NO OTHER RULES.
*SPECIAL RULE TO SETTLE THE WATSON TURF WAR BETWEEN MAELSTROM AND THE TYGER CLAWS: WHOEVER SURVIVES TO THE END OR PLACES HIGHER WINS CONTROL OF THE OLD ARASAKA WATERFRONT. MUST BE THE OVERALL FIRST PLACE WINNER TO COLLECT THE 10K.
NEWS BROADCAST TRANSCRIPT: Welcome to N54 News — I’m Gillean Jordan, and this is the latest from around the world. Arasaka’s devastating fall from grace on the international stage at the close of this decade is expected to usher in a shockingly explosive beginning to the 80s for the Megacorporation. Reports from the company’s primary headquarters in Tokyo have confirmed that in early February, recently ousted Chief Executive Officer Yorinobu Arasaka will stand trial for egregious crimes against the megacorp’s board of directors, shareholders, and investors, resulting in the loss of jobs and income for all employees outside Japan and billions of Eurodollars in damages worldwide. Some of the alleged charges against Yorinobu include but are not limited to: internal corporate sabotage resulting in the significant loss of profit and stock value, conspiracy to commit sabotage with outside known criminal parties, orchestrating the leak of Top-Clearance classified information concerning the company’s research into what is being reported as “The Mikoshi Project,” and spreading deliberate misinformation about the nature of The now-defunct Mikoshi Project both slanderously and libelously through established Media outlets. The biggest shock from this press release is surprisingly not the firing of an Arasaka family member or the corporation’s executive board pursuing justice through criminal liability trials, but the news that Yorinobu is also set to be tried for murder regarding the 2077 death of his father, Arasaka company founder, Saburo Arasaka. Saburo’s former Head of Personal Security, Goro Takemura, is set to travel to Tokyo and testify against the founder’s son after receiving a package of datashards from a former corporate-affiliated netrunner who procured security footage from the interior of Yorinobu’s penthouse in Konpeki Plaza the night of the elder Mr. Arasaka’s unexpected and sudden death. According to Mr. Takemura, for the past nearly three years, video surveillance clearly showing Yorinobu strangling his father has been stored in a highly encrypted data fortress belonging to the disgraced executive, hidden on private backdoor servers within the Arasaka mainframe to conceal existing evidence of wrongdoing, obstruct justice, and eliminate any potential threat of blackmail. Yorinobu’s attorneys have released a statement as they seek to dismiss the video from being presented in court, citing that the ‘supposed footage of a murder’ is AI-generated as an act of sabotage on the part of the board of directors who ‘seek to steal the company from under family control because they disagree with his controversial decision to localize employment solely in Tokyo and discontinue the Mikoshi Project. What they’re labeling as intentional destruction of the Arasaka corporation is saving investors hundreds of millions of Eurodollars long-term by eliminating unnecessary and largely redundant costs.’
DIALOGUE TRANSCRIPT:
MIDAS: One more replacement chip and a quick fuel cell top-up, then we should be ready to run diagnostics again. Sound good?
3JANE: Why do you do that?
MIDAS: Do what?
3JANE: Talk to me like I have actual feelings about anything. Why ask if it ‘sounds good?’ I’m not publicly performing emulations of humanity at this particular moment, so it seems… [she pauses, contemplating for a second.] pointless.
MIDAS: I don’t know — [He snickers] I told a vending machine to stop being a bitch and it wasn’t even one of the ones that had an AI attached to it. Doesn’t mean I genuinely think it gave me a cold burrito out of spite… It’s not that deep, alright? Just banal small talk while we do this to make it less awkward.
3JANE: Less awkward for you, you mean – I don’t struggle with the concept of awkwardness. It’s interesting that you’re in the regular habit of talking to electronics and common household appliances as if they’re sentient in the same regard, even though you know they’re not.
MIDAS: Your programming should’ve prepared you for a lot of human behaviors to not make any goddamn sense by the standards of some universally applied objective logic — people are weird and they do weird shit.
3JANE: I wouldn’t say your behavior is entirely without logic.
MIDAS: Yeah?
3JANE: You seek one-sided companionship with inanimate items and artificial lifeforms because you are either stubbornly unwilling or woefully incompetent in the task of performing socialization with other humans. [she smirks smugly.] It makes you feel awkward.
MIDAS: I’m pretty competent at knowing where your Sleep Mode button is — stop being a bitch or you’ll wake up outside when the diagnostic’s over; you’re doing it on purpose.
